can you boot from an ext. USB Hard Drive?

sorry if that's already answered in an old thread but even goolgle didn't find anything useful.

can you boot a Al powerbook from an usb drive? (given that there is a system cloned to this drive)

would that only work if you select that drive as a startup disk or does it also work in case of a internal hd failure without the chance to set the start up disk? in other words will the usb drive automatically be detected as start up disk?

sorry if that's already answered in an old thread but even goolgle didn't find anything useful.

can you boot a Al powerbook from an usb drive? (given that there is a system cloned to this drive)

would that only work if you select that drive as a startup disk or does it also work in case of a internal hd failure without the chance to set the start up disk? in other words will the usb drive automatically be detected as start up disk?

thanks, ANDY

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I'm not an expert on this but I did try to boot my old iMac G3 with a Lacie pocket drive using usb (Firewire fried) and I have to say it was unsuccessful as the data transfer rates are too low, as for usb 2 haven't tried it yet but for some reason (probably read it in a thread here on MR) I think that it would not work, Firewire is the only way to go IMHO.

sorry if that's already answered in an old thread but even goolgle didn't find anything useful.

can you boot a Al powerbook from an usb drive? (given that there is a system cloned to this drive)

would that only work if you select that drive as a startup disk or does it also work in case of a internal hd failure without the chance to set the start up disk? in other words will the usb drive automatically be detected as start up disk?

I don't want to start another debate about BIOS/open firmware, but Intel systems can boot from USB. I did some training @ Intel's campus in Hillsborough, OR about a year ago, and we were booting Itanium2s from a USB 2.0 thumb drive. Used it to run Diags. and utilities, pre-OS.
Depending on how Apple designs their BIOS/Firmware chip, it would be posible to boot from USB, at least from a hardware perspective. I do not know if OSX can handle boot from USB

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